For a comprehensive list of activities in and around DeLand click here

New Feature:

Area artists and writers.

Submit samples of your art or short stories in the form of graphic .jpg files or PDF for text to 2000shadesofgray@gmail.com for publication in our blog.

Sample art Aboriginal tapestry from Australia.

Please accompany your personal and contact information and a statement that you are the original artist or writer and own the rights to the work. Only verified original pieces will be published. 2000SOG will create a new Art Section and Creative Writing section. Submissions from artists under 18 years must be accompanied by references from a responsible adult. All works submitted remain the property of the artist and may be deleted at your request by email to 2000shadesofgray@gmail.com

We will need phone and email information from artists and website addresses where applicable. For Sale items may be included. Limit 5 pieces per artist in each category.

Please try to keep your files small. Large text files may be zipped for emailing.

This should be fun!

BARBERVILLE FAMILY FARM SWAP MEET

Come join the agriculture family of the Barberville Family Farm Swap & Market this Saturday morning, meet your local farmers and ranchers & enjoy some of the best homemade cooked goods that you will find along with organic, hydro, vegan foods.

Several Nurseries’ will have just about any landscaping plants/trees that you will need, and there will be plenty of livestock, fowl, tools, etc.

Everybody can sell at this farm market, only $5.00 donation and there will be a farmer only raffle at noon where a single farmer goes home with the $, after operating expenses. (Please, only farm, agricultural related) If you have any questions, call Lloyd at 386-469-9409.

Please check out our web site at www.farmswapmarket.com, it is always kept updated with new information and our Face book page is a great way to stay in touch with your farmers and let them know what your looking to buy or sell at this weeks farm market.

Tell a friend to meet you at the Barberville Family Farm Swap & Market this Saturday morning !

Tech DeLand is a group of technology enthusiasts in the Downtown DeLand area meeting once a month to encourage a better understanding of technology. This month’s meeting will be at Cafe DaVinci from 6pm-9pm. This month’s topics are Child Themes in WordPress for Podcasters and an Introduction to Angular.js. For more information, please visit: techdeland.com

Friday

Downtown DeLand is the place to be on 4th Fridays! Enjoy the Art Walk along the Boulevard, see demonstrations, and meet artists hosted by our local merchants. Continue your stroll to Artisan Alley for more festivities including the farmer’s market and Art in the Alley. www.FourthFridayDeLand.com

January 23 – Tech DeLandJanuary 24 – 4th Friday DeLand January 24-February 9 – Sands Theater Company Presents: The 39 Steps Mix a Hitchcock masterpiece with a juicy spy novel, add a dash of Monty Python and you have The 39 Steps, a fast-paced whodunit for anyone who loves the magic of theater! At the Athens Theatre. www.athensdeland.com January 31- February 9 – DeLand Craft Beer Week There will be a week full of events leading up to the DeLand Craft Beer Festival including a homebrew competition, kickoff party, bottle share, beer scavenger hunt “meet the reps” reception, DeLand Craft Beer Festival after party & hangover brunch. More Info

February:

February 8 – DeLand Craft Beer Festival Featuring craft beers, rare & vintage beers, imports, educational break out sessions, live music from The Republik, live art by Paleface & a home brew competition. Must be 21 to enter. No pets. No children. Held in Artisan Alley, Downtown DeLand. General admission tickets are $35. VIP tickets are $55 and also include admission to a Rare and Vintage Pairing Party on Thursday February 6 (limited qty available). Pick up tickets at the MainStreet DeLand Association or reserve online at: www.delandcraftbeerfestival.com .February 12 – Wine, Women & Chocolate Be a Downtown Diva the second Wednesday of every month from 5:30-7:30pm and discover what downtown DeLand has to offer! Enjoy special sales, discounts, giveaways and other promotions. winewomenandchocolatedeland.com

February 27 – Tech DeLand Tech DeLand is a group of technology enthusiasts in the Downtown DeLand area meeting once a month to encourage a better understanding of technology. For meeting locations and speaker information, please visit: techdeland.com February 28 – 4th Friday DeLand Downtown DeLand is the place to be on 4th Fridays! Enjoy the Art Walk along the Boulevard, see demonstrations, and meet artists hosted by our local merchants. Continue your stroll to Artisan Alley for more festivities including the farmer’s market and Art in the Alley. www.FourthFridayDeLand.com

The answer could be to adopt a pet. Here is your opportunity to enrich and possibly extend your life … and provide a home for an animal that will give you unconditional love forever. Your original cost is deeply discounted and all these animals are vetted and ready to love.

Seniors looking to fill the empty spaces in retirement might find beekeeping a profitable and entertaining hobby. A new club for beekeepers is forming in this area now. There are many benefits to keeping bees. Everyone of all ages can keep bees. If you have a bee sting allergy, you might want to start an ant farm instead.

The Bee Hive blog, “give bees a chance” has information on the history of beekeeping, modern methods, what flowers bees love, the anatomy of the bee and many other facts. There are also links to some other major beekeeping sites including Ten Amazing Bee Facts.

Individuals and communities could cooperate in a beekeeping enterprise. When the club starts meeting there will be a lot of information shared. The weather in Florida is ideal for bees. There is still enough garden and farm growth to sustain bees food supplies. Go to the link below to read for yourself. http://givebeesachance.blogspot.com/

There’s a very small structure deep in the center of our brains called the hippocampus. It’s smaller than your pinkie, but it plays an absolutely essential role in learning and memory. The hippocampus encodes new information so that we can recall it later. Without a hippocampus, we would be unable to form new memories; we’d only be able to remember the old ones.

An elderly couple holds hands while walking along a Berlin street. A recent study showed that walking grows the region of the brain that archives memories.

As part of normal aging, the hippocampus shrinks. And this shrinkage speeds up as we grow older, foreshadowing memory problems and dementias like Alzheimer’s disease.

But there’s been some good news in the past decade: Scientists have discovered that in certain areas of the aging brain, new cells are born and grow throughout life. Neuroscientist Peter Snyder, a researcher at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School and Rhode Island Hospital, says the hippocampus is one of those brain areas that continue to form new cells and make new connections between cells.

“What we’re finding is that of all of these noninvasive ways of intervening, it is exercise that seems to have the most efficacy at this point — more so than nutritional supplements, vitamins and cognitive interventions,” says Snyder, who studies what we can do to maintain memory as our brains age.

Power Of Exercise

Snyder says several studies have been published recently on the power of exercise on the aging brain.

“The literature on exercise is just tremendous,” he says. “What we find is that with exercise — with aerobic exercise, a moderate amount on a regular basis — there are chemical changes that occur in the brain that promote the growth of new neurons in [the hippocampus].”

The major chemical change in the hippocampus during aerobic exercise is an increase in a brain protein called BDNF, which acts like a fertilizer during the birth of new brain cells by nourishing new connections between neurons.

Some of the most provocative evidence on the power of exercise on the brain comes from a study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by neuroscientist Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kramer and his colleagues have documented the impact of exercise on the growth of the hippocampus in a small group of elderly people over the course of one year.

He adds none had dementia or memory problems when they entered the study. “They were relatively healthy, but certainly ‘couch potatoes’ would fit as a label.”

Getting Couch Potatoes Moving

One of those “couch potatoes” who volunteered for the study was Gregory Stanton, a 66-year-old semi-retired college professor. He admits to not exercising regularly but counters that he was physically quite active remodeling his home. So he refers to himself as “a semi-couch potato.”

Stanton and the other 120 men and women in the study ranged from 60 to 80 years old. When they entered the study, they were randomly divided into two groups.

“One was the aerobic exercise group,” Kramer says. “Those were people who walked further and faster as time went on. And the others in our control group were in a toning, stretching and light-strengthening group.”

Stanton was randomly assigned to the aerobic exercise group.

“Basically, it’s walking a track in one of the gym facilities,” Stanton says. He and the others in the aerobic group walked the track for about 40 minutes three times a week for a year. Stanton says he averaged about 3 miles each session. After each session, he was breathing hard and had worked up a sweat, he says.

The idea was for each participant to walk fast enough to reach aerobic exercise level, Kramer explains, which is generally considered to be 70 percent of one’s maximum heart rate.

Walkers Fared Better

All the participants in the study had MRI brain scans done before the study began and again a year later when the study ended. Then the researchers analyzed the MRI data. “What we found,” Kramer says, “is that individuals in the aerobic group showed increases in the volume of their hippocampus.”

The increase in volume — again for the aerobic but not for the non-aerobic group — was about 2 percent.

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Sen. Richard Lugar ran in the Capital Challenge 5k race in 2008

Many scientists are still optimistic about prevention, partly because they are also considering research done on animals.

At about the time the panel was releasing its report, a 78-year-old senator was doing something he hopes is good for his brain.

Dick Lugar running in 5K

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) was competing in an annual charity race a few miles from Capitol Hill. He’s been a runner since grade school and says he thinks exercise helps him remember a lot of stuff, including “the names and places of thousands of people and events that I bring up frequently in the course of debate.

“It’s very helpful to have that kind of historical knowledge of my constituency, as well as of the world,” Lugar said.

How Exercise Might Help Keep Alzheimer’s At Bay

Scientists are trying to figure out how physical and mental exercise protects the brain.

“The 2 percent increase we can think of as turning back the clock about two years,” Kramer says.

The increased volume was found in the anterior, or front part, of the hippocampus. That’s the area of the hippocampus that has been shown to grow as a function of exercise in several animal studies.

By comparison, “the individuals in the control group — in the toning and stretching group — lost about 1.5 percent [of their hippocampal volume],” Kramer says. “So we can think of it as about a 3.5 percent difference compared to those individuals who didn’t benefit aerobically.”

The results are small but suggestive. This finding shows that not only did the aerobic exercise protect against normal shrinkage, but also that new cells were added to the hippocampus. The researchers also saw a significant increase in that important brain-fertilizing chemical BDNF in the plasma of those in the aerobic exercise group — but not in the control group.

Impact On Memory

But did the growth in the hippocampus translate into improvements in memory? Both groups were given memory tests before and after the yearlong exercise program. Kramer says these tests looked specifically at a type of memory called “spatial memory,” which records information about our environment, like the layout of the neighborhood or the interior of the grocery store.

At the start of the study, both the aerobic and the non-aerobic group scored similarly on the spatial memory test. But after the yearlong program, the group that did aerobic exercises had improved significantly on its spatial memory tests, bettering its own scores from a year earlier. The non-aerobic group had not improved in memory after a year of stretching, toning and lightweight lifting.

As for “semi-couch potato” Stanton, who’d been in the aerobic group, he says he didn’t notice any improvement in his memory. He still has problems remembering people’s names. But he did notice he had more physical stamina after the yearlong aerobic walking program.

In spite of this, Stanton says he still doesn’t maintain a regular exercise regimen. He says while he knows it’s good for him, he, like many of us, can’t find the time. He’s just too busy.